Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the leading cause of death in humans in the U.S. CHD is so pervasive that more humans die of CHD than from any other disease. CHD is caused by a narrowing of the coronary arteries that supply blood to the heart. Too often, this narrowing tragically results in a heart attack in the victim. Unfortunately, each year about a million Americans have a heart attack and tragically about half or more of these heart attacks are fatal even before the heart attack victim can get to a treatment facility.
Without being bound by theory, in one aspect of early stage of CHD (atherosclerosis), it is believed that plaque or fatty materials build up inside the walls of human arteries (carrying oxygenated blood) along with blood components which are attracted to the plaque or fatty materials and sometimes an atheroma results. Sometimes the fatty buildup or plaque breaks open (i.e. plaque rupture) in a human artery which leads to formation of a clot that seals a defect in the artery but unfortunately restricts blood flow resulting in an acute vascular event. When too little blood reaches the beating heart as a result of this restriction in blood flow, ischemia results.
When ischemia is of a long duration there is generally a resulting heart attack which unfortunately is all too often sometimes fatal. In some situations ischemia disturbs the heart's normal rhythm inducing an abnormal increasingly disruptive rhythm such as malignant ventricular arrhythmia which is also usually destructively fatal. Overall, it is the progressive stenosis of an arterial lumen that is believed to be a major contributing factor to a fatal heart attack results for the victim.
In an effort to combat human heart attacks, medical research strives to identify those individuals pre-attack with a high risk toward atherosclerosis and to identify a preventative or treatment regime for them such as an alternative lifestyle, and to identify drugs which are effective against arterial atherosclerosis.
Difficult challenges are presented in that the process of discovering and developing new pharmaceutical drugs is increasingly expensive and challenging. For example, the average length of time from the discovery of a candidate drug to the time of its U.S. Federal Drug Administration approval has increased. And currently it is estimated that an average of 10,000 or more lead (candidate) compounds must be tested in pre-clinical development for every drug that is finally marketed.
Additionally it is estimated that existing pharmaceutical drugs interact with less than five hundred or so biological targets out of an estimated large number of potential targets (˜10,000). If this estimate is correct then, this means that the majority of potential drug targets remain undiscovered using presently available techniques.
Thus, despite rapid and noteworthy advances in medical science in this field, a dire need exists for accurately determining the risk to atherosclerosis to individuals, for alerting such individuals to their existing or developing risk, for providing a treatment regime to an afflicted human and for a method of identifying pharmacological drugs which are therapeutic to preventing or ameliorating dangerous and potentially fatal CHD. Further, it is highly desired to have a sensitive and specific biomarker to assess the extent of atherosclerosis in human arteries.